Also, Alan, I did read your What’s Alan Watching Blog during Mad Men and you and the community there was exactly what a show like Mad Men needed. The comments were always deep and granular- so satisfying for a Maddict.
I started reading you back when you reviewed the Sopranos, and the same can be said of those fans too. Your reviews are deep, thoughtful, and you recognize the nuance in these types of shows. And you attract a certain type of TV viewer.
Thank you for the ten+ years of insightful and often times brilliant reviews of TV. You are the right critic at the right time: the start of prestige TV.
I thought the finale of Mad Men was brilliant. I felt so much tension while Don was wandering aimless in Big Sur, while his ex wife was dying and his career was imploding. I remember feeling so thirsty for that call between Peggy and Don- it was heartbreaking, and vulnerable. “I scandalized my child” stands out in particular.
But what was so brilliant was OF COURSE Don Draper will never change. That’s the point of the entire show. People perform for you but they are who they are deep down. It was a master stroke that an ad exec took a moment of enlightenment and peace and made it into a commodity. I had NO idea it would end that way and was shocked and thrilled. It was genius. That little grin on Don’s face while he’s “meditating “. God bless Jon Hamm.
I rewatched during the Covid lockdown and it was just as good.
I’m speed-reading my way through the Parker series right now. A little late, I guess. (I’ve owned Point Blank on three different generations of media.)
But for a guy who loves Travis McGee, the Continental Op, and Harper, it’s a great series.
There was an article years ago about how appointment TV ended with Game of Thrones. I still think GoT was the last high-water mark for that as a cultural phenomenon, but it actually ended with Mad Men for me. That was the last Sunday night drama I'd be itching to watch all day Sunday and then really excited to discuss for the next few days, read multiple exhaustive reviews, enjoy all the goofy memes ("Not great, Bob!"), and later in the series snicker at all the crazy theories people would come up with (Megan's T-shirt).
There have been other great shows since then, but very few of Mad Men's extremely high caliber and none of them have been the same type of communal experience with all the stellar, loving analysis that followed. Really miss that.
Mad Men is all all-timer for me and I've rewatched it probably 5 times since it went off the air. "Person to Person" just gets better and better the more you watch the series, IMO. My interpretation of the ending has changed over the years, but my current one is that it represents Don Draper (a person that was created) finding enlightenment, which, of course, would be an ad campaign, because Don Draper doesn't really exist.
The only really false note in the episode is still the Peggy and Stan stuff, not because I don't buy they'd get together, but that it sort of comes out of nowhere. It's a false note for a show that very rarely indulged in them, but Peggy already got her real happy ending in the previous episode when she saunters into McCann, so, fine.
God, I'd completely blocked out Peggy and Stan's moment, which I now remember being annoyed by as much for the execution of the scene as for the need to have it happen at all in the finale.
Speaking of Mad Men, what did you think of Hamm & Slattery reprising their iconic roles (w/o Weiner’s permission) in Seinfeld’s terrible Netflix movie last year? It was so weird to me.
Oh I love the Peggy-Stan scene and Peggy's realization. I don't think it came out of nowhere - it had been building for years! I think it was nice that Peggy and Joan got happy endings that suggested fulfillment for them, though in opposite ways. Joan went out on her own and Peggy found a life partner.
Thanks for keeping up the recaps of Poker Face. My favorite thing this week was the chance to see John Sayles as the Sheriff, and , thus, remind myself that I need to run down some old John Sayles movies to watch. (Assume his TV show Shannon's Deal is not going to be available anywhere. Hope they decide that a third season is worth the trouble.
Thank you for bringing up Sayles! I watched this episode so many weeks ago I neglected to mention him. It's an homage to Alligator, one of the B-movies he wrote to help subsidize his indie directorial efforts.
Forgot about Alligator. Thanks for the reference. Thought it might have been due to Edie Falco Florida movie. I now have to see if Tubi has Lady in Red or Piranha (after ImDB check-in.)
I was stunned that Josh Holloway didn't turn into the next Harrison Ford-type leading man after LOST. Glad to see him in a starring role again.
Is it uncool to say I'm interested in a J.J. Abrams production? At the very least I know it will probably be slick and entertaining and the casting will be dead-on perfect.
It's wild to me how "uncool" it's gotten to like anything J.J. since the Star Wars sequels. Especially when a new Mission: Impossible movie comes out and everyone ranks the series. Can't relate!
Since we're all reminiscing about the Mad Men finale and I've seen posts about all the other characters: I feel like we got our real Roger sendoff with the penultimate episode with Peggy in the empty office, which I adore.
But I also really liked where they left Pete and Trudy - I actually think Pete may have undergone the most growth of all the male characters and loved the reunion.
Mad Men is my favorite show of all time, so yes I've done a full rewatch since the show ended (reading along with MZS's book).
I love the series finale - it's one of my favorite series finales ever. Don hits rock bottom (phone call with Peggy) and then has an emotional breakthrough in the therapy circle (two of the most devastating scenes the show ever produced) and then goes back to doing what he does best. Despite the natural wish for him to have evolved thoroughly enough to leave advertising behind, I find this ending to be far more realistic. People can change - but not that much.
Maybe the biggest drawback to Disney's decision to compress all of Andor's remaining seasons into one is that we were robbed of more K2SO and its relationship to Cassian. In the film it feels like they've been teammates for a long time but it's basically just a year or so in the show.
SPOiLER: The other thing we were robbed of is both more of Dedra and Syril's relationship but also the aftermath of Syril's demise on Dedra. In her final moment in the series, it's unclear what she's mourning: her downfall/being scapegoated, losing Syril, or ending up in an Imperial prison. It could be all of them, but the lack of any real emotional resolution for such an important character/arc is a bit disappointing. Partagaz gets a better resolution than Dedra.
The three episodes and then jump a year format left a lot of things hanging as we essentially did a speed run to Rogue One. A lot of characters got an introduction and/or a set up in a situation which gets dropped when we blipped forward a year,
The Deedra/Syril relationship was so interesting to me and I really wanted to see at least a little of the aftermath of Syril dying, but they wanted to make sure they set up the movie, so none of that made the cut.
Where the episodes occur in each timeline is still a bit confusing for me, but it wasn't until I was reading comments that I realized that S2:12 ends right before the film starts. That really wasn't necessary but I didn't mind it either.
I do think that the time spent on Yavin and the Wheat planet in the first 3 eps was wasted narrative, the Ghorman storyline could have better used that screentime: more with the Syril/Dedra relationship, the aftermath of the Ghorman massacre, and Syril's death. Syril and Dedra were great characters and performances, they deserved more attention in S2. Still enjoyed everything we got, it was an unprecedented high-wire act to pull off something as ambitious/insane as compressing multiple seasons into one. Definitely not something I necessarily want to see more of but Gilroy made it work.
I'm going to watch Duster mostly because my mother drove a 1971 Plymouth Duster through the best years of my childhood and I have very fond memories of it. Her Duster was orange (yes, really) not cherry red, but the previews I've seen bring back such good memories... I remember she bought a bag of grass seed that broke open in the back seat, with a lot of seeds getting stuck in the curly polyester carpeting. And then a window leaked, bringing in water, and we had grass growing out of the carpet for a year or two. She bought that car new in 1971 and had it until the summer of 1978, when we were moving to Fort Lauderdale. She drove that old car all the way down there... and it died when she pulled into our new condo. But that car gave me so many memories ... when my brother and I were shoveling snow and our hands got too cold, we would use the cigarette lighter to warm our hands... Good times... I don't care of the show Duster sucks, just seeing the car will make it all worthwhile...
The AMC Stories free channel ran Mad Men a few months ago and it's on again this month. I'll put it on while scrolling, Monopoly Go'ing, cooking, eating etc. Get drawn into favorite scenes/eps and find little nuggets that mean even more after a minimum of four rewatches. Reading your reviews and interacting with the commenters back in the day was a blast.
I finished a rewatch of Mad Men a few weeks ago (having rewatched Breaking Bad, The Wire, and The Leftovers in the last couple years). I remembered being frustrated by a lot of the final season, but really I think my two biggest issues were the split season (irrelevant on binging) and Don's fixation on Diana the waitress. Those last few episodes are pretty terrific, and everything feels immensely satisfying without being fan service—right down to Joan trying cocaine for the first time, and failing to convince Peggy to start a production company with her.
The Stan/Peggy scene is a satisfying scene on its own merits, but does feel out of left field, or at least too much too fast. (I wouldn't have wanted a drawn-out "will they or won't they" situation with them either, though—there's no shortage of that in every other show.) I don't know if I'm reading too much into it, but it makes it seem like they wanted to make sure they left Peggy in a place where we could be confident that she'll finally end up in a healthy relationship with someone who understands how much and why work is important to her, but didn't consider that important for Don. I'm not convinced it was actually important for Peggy, at least to me as a viewer.
But still, ultimately I'm happy with where we leave all of the characters I'm most invested in, and it all feels earned. Hard to pull off.
(It's funny Mad Men and Duster coming up in the same post, because I am still bothered by some of the stuff in Don's timeline, though it's definitely not as egregious.)
It's fun to find the bread crumbs leading to the Peggy/Stan hook-up on a rewatch. The locked up in the hotel and getting naked episode got it started. Many other times Stan made little gestures showing his affection. One of the creative dudes from Cutler/Gleason/Chaugh called him out with a "get a room" type comment. There was a kiss at one point that Peggy was kind of blind to. The foundation was laid over many years.
That's fair -- the "out of leftfield" part is really only true of Peggy's side of it, and maybe that fits? Maybe that's what works best for her arc -- all these guys who either don't understand or appreciate her work (not sure where Duck fits into that, but he doesn't have much respect for creative in general), and then the guy who is maybe finally the right fit is a guy who has had the time both to get to know her as a person and to truly respect her work, and she's so work focused that she doesn't see it coming.
Yesss!!! I hated the Diana story. And I'm a Mad Men apologist. It felt so wrong-footed to me. Like why is he pursuing this woman?? Perhaps just a sign of how lost he was by that point.
100%. I think a lot about it works on paper—I can buy that Don is at a point that he fixates on this woman for reasons that don't really have anything to do with her, and that it's a convenient excuse for him to bolt, which he's been threatening to do since first season. It's just that Diana isn't a very interesting character (which I don't think is the fault of the performance, Elizabeth Reaser is great in other stuff), and so the whole thing is just tedious to watch. It's a rare misfire, it's just unfortunate that it happens in the final stretch.
On the plus side, it got him on the road! I thought the stuff between him and the veterans group was very strong. Wojo smacking him with a phone book! And the little bit of him making up a cover story while looking for Diana made me think I would've liked to see him in a Paper Moon TV show. He's got good "charming traveling con man" energy.
I agree completely. I found her so unappealing - like what is it he sees in her? All of his other affairs were wonderful, three-dimensional female characters, so why is this the last one we see?
It's in my queue, but I'm underwater on so many things. And subtitled material simply takes longer for me to watch, I'm afraid, and I'd prefer not to watch the dubs if I can help it.
Also, Alan, I did read your What’s Alan Watching Blog during Mad Men and you and the community there was exactly what a show like Mad Men needed. The comments were always deep and granular- so satisfying for a Maddict.
I started reading you back when you reviewed the Sopranos, and the same can be said of those fans too. Your reviews are deep, thoughtful, and you recognize the nuance in these types of shows. And you attract a certain type of TV viewer.
Thank you for the ten+ years of insightful and often times brilliant reviews of TV. You are the right critic at the right time: the start of prestige TV.
Thank you for reading all this time!
I thought the finale of Mad Men was brilliant. I felt so much tension while Don was wandering aimless in Big Sur, while his ex wife was dying and his career was imploding. I remember feeling so thirsty for that call between Peggy and Don- it was heartbreaking, and vulnerable. “I scandalized my child” stands out in particular.
But what was so brilliant was OF COURSE Don Draper will never change. That’s the point of the entire show. People perform for you but they are who they are deep down. It was a master stroke that an ad exec took a moment of enlightenment and peace and made it into a commodity. I had NO idea it would end that way and was shocked and thrilled. It was genius. That little grin on Don’s face while he’s “meditating “. God bless Jon Hamm.
I rewatched during the Covid lockdown and it was just as good.
That call is among Hamm's best scenes in the show, I think, which is wild for a *phone call*.
agree 100%
Re: Title of this week’s newsletter: I understood that reference!
I was hoping at least one person would!
I’m speed-reading my way through the Parker series right now. A little late, I guess. (I’ve owned Point Blank on three different generations of media.)
But for a guy who loves Travis McGee, the Continental Op, and Harper, it’s a great series.
There was an article years ago about how appointment TV ended with Game of Thrones. I still think GoT was the last high-water mark for that as a cultural phenomenon, but it actually ended with Mad Men for me. That was the last Sunday night drama I'd be itching to watch all day Sunday and then really excited to discuss for the next few days, read multiple exhaustive reviews, enjoy all the goofy memes ("Not great, Bob!"), and later in the series snicker at all the crazy theories people would come up with (Megan's T-shirt).
There have been other great shows since then, but very few of Mad Men's extremely high caliber and none of them have been the same type of communal experience with all the stellar, loving analysis that followed. Really miss that.
Mad Men is all all-timer for me and I've rewatched it probably 5 times since it went off the air. "Person to Person" just gets better and better the more you watch the series, IMO. My interpretation of the ending has changed over the years, but my current one is that it represents Don Draper (a person that was created) finding enlightenment, which, of course, would be an ad campaign, because Don Draper doesn't really exist.
The only really false note in the episode is still the Peggy and Stan stuff, not because I don't buy they'd get together, but that it sort of comes out of nowhere. It's a false note for a show that very rarely indulged in them, but Peggy already got her real happy ending in the previous episode when she saunters into McCann, so, fine.
God, I'd completely blocked out Peggy and Stan's moment, which I now remember being annoyed by as much for the execution of the scene as for the need to have it happen at all in the finale.
Speaking of Mad Men, what did you think of Hamm & Slattery reprising their iconic roles (w/o Weiner’s permission) in Seinfeld’s terrible Netflix movie last year? It was so weird to me.
Didn't watch it.
Oh I love the Peggy-Stan scene and Peggy's realization. I don't think it came out of nowhere - it had been building for years! I think it was nice that Peggy and Joan got happy endings that suggested fulfillment for them, though in opposite ways. Joan went out on her own and Peggy found a life partner.
I just looked up my comments on the Mad Men finale the other day and one of them was the absolute WTFery of Peggy & Stan.
Holloway is basically playing Wooderson’s dad.
Thanks for keeping up the recaps of Poker Face. My favorite thing this week was the chance to see John Sayles as the Sheriff, and , thus, remind myself that I need to run down some old John Sayles movies to watch. (Assume his TV show Shannon's Deal is not going to be available anywhere. Hope they decide that a third season is worth the trouble.
Thank you for bringing up Sayles! I watched this episode so many weeks ago I neglected to mention him. It's an homage to Alligator, one of the B-movies he wrote to help subsidize his indie directorial efforts.
Forgot about Alligator. Thanks for the reference. Thought it might have been due to Edie Falco Florida movie. I now have to see if Tubi has Lady in Red or Piranha (after ImDB check-in.)
Most of Shannon’s deal is on YouTube (and the person who posted it has many, MANY rare shows on their channel)
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAkFwZCQjyWw0umdwzeZ3TaWzsDsU2Dwt&feature=shared
Thanks for this resource.
Given the news of the week, Eight Men Out might be a good choice.
I was stunned that Josh Holloway didn't turn into the next Harrison Ford-type leading man after LOST. Glad to see him in a starring role again.
Is it uncool to say I'm interested in a J.J. Abrams production? At the very least I know it will probably be slick and entertaining and the casting will be dead-on perfect.
yeah, same. I always wondered why Holloway didn't have a bigger post-LOST career
It's wild to me how "uncool" it's gotten to like anything J.J. since the Star Wars sequels. Especially when a new Mission: Impossible movie comes out and everyone ranks the series. Can't relate!
Since we're all reminiscing about the Mad Men finale and I've seen posts about all the other characters: I feel like we got our real Roger sendoff with the penultimate episode with Peggy in the empty office, which I adore.
But I also really liked where they left Pete and Trudy - I actually think Pete may have undergone the most growth of all the male characters and loved the reunion.
Mad Men is my favorite show of all time, so yes I've done a full rewatch since the show ended (reading along with MZS's book).
I love the series finale - it's one of my favorite series finales ever. Don hits rock bottom (phone call with Peggy) and then has an emotional breakthrough in the therapy circle (two of the most devastating scenes the show ever produced) and then goes back to doing what he does best. Despite the natural wish for him to have evolved thoroughly enough to leave advertising behind, I find this ending to be far more realistic. People can change - but not that much.
Maybe the biggest drawback to Disney's decision to compress all of Andor's remaining seasons into one is that we were robbed of more K2SO and its relationship to Cassian. In the film it feels like they've been teammates for a long time but it's basically just a year or so in the show.
SPOiLER: The other thing we were robbed of is both more of Dedra and Syril's relationship but also the aftermath of Syril's demise on Dedra. In her final moment in the series, it's unclear what she's mourning: her downfall/being scapegoated, losing Syril, or ending up in an Imperial prison. It could be all of them, but the lack of any real emotional resolution for such an important character/arc is a bit disappointing. Partagaz gets a better resolution than Dedra.
The three episodes and then jump a year format left a lot of things hanging as we essentially did a speed run to Rogue One. A lot of characters got an introduction and/or a set up in a situation which gets dropped when we blipped forward a year,
The Deedra/Syril relationship was so interesting to me and I really wanted to see at least a little of the aftermath of Syril dying, but they wanted to make sure they set up the movie, so none of that made the cut.
Where the episodes occur in each timeline is still a bit confusing for me, but it wasn't until I was reading comments that I realized that S2:12 ends right before the film starts. That really wasn't necessary but I didn't mind it either.
I do think that the time spent on Yavin and the Wheat planet in the first 3 eps was wasted narrative, the Ghorman storyline could have better used that screentime: more with the Syril/Dedra relationship, the aftermath of the Ghorman massacre, and Syril's death. Syril and Dedra were great characters and performances, they deserved more attention in S2. Still enjoyed everything we got, it was an unprecedented high-wire act to pull off something as ambitious/insane as compressing multiple seasons into one. Definitely not something I necessarily want to see more of but Gilroy made it work.
I'm going to watch Duster mostly because my mother drove a 1971 Plymouth Duster through the best years of my childhood and I have very fond memories of it. Her Duster was orange (yes, really) not cherry red, but the previews I've seen bring back such good memories... I remember she bought a bag of grass seed that broke open in the back seat, with a lot of seeds getting stuck in the curly polyester carpeting. And then a window leaked, bringing in water, and we had grass growing out of the carpet for a year or two. She bought that car new in 1971 and had it until the summer of 1978, when we were moving to Fort Lauderdale. She drove that old car all the way down there... and it died when she pulled into our new condo. But that car gave me so many memories ... when my brother and I were shoveling snow and our hands got too cold, we would use the cigarette lighter to warm our hands... Good times... I don't care of the show Duster sucks, just seeing the car will make it all worthwhile...
The ending of Andor definitely feels like a certain era of the franchise closed on the live-action tv side:
- Only Ahsoka S2 is on horizon and that's next year-ish.
- The only new shows ordered have been animated.
- Producers seemed to be shifting the Mandalorian into being a movie series.
- Assuming Skeleton Crew not coming back anytime soon (or maybe canceled) with Armstrong being named the lead in the Buffy reboot.
The AMC Stories free channel ran Mad Men a few months ago and it's on again this month. I'll put it on while scrolling, Monopoly Go'ing, cooking, eating etc. Get drawn into favorite scenes/eps and find little nuggets that mean even more after a minimum of four rewatches. Reading your reviews and interacting with the commenters back in the day was a blast.
I finished a rewatch of Mad Men a few weeks ago (having rewatched Breaking Bad, The Wire, and The Leftovers in the last couple years). I remembered being frustrated by a lot of the final season, but really I think my two biggest issues were the split season (irrelevant on binging) and Don's fixation on Diana the waitress. Those last few episodes are pretty terrific, and everything feels immensely satisfying without being fan service—right down to Joan trying cocaine for the first time, and failing to convince Peggy to start a production company with her.
The Stan/Peggy scene is a satisfying scene on its own merits, but does feel out of left field, or at least too much too fast. (I wouldn't have wanted a drawn-out "will they or won't they" situation with them either, though—there's no shortage of that in every other show.) I don't know if I'm reading too much into it, but it makes it seem like they wanted to make sure they left Peggy in a place where we could be confident that she'll finally end up in a healthy relationship with someone who understands how much and why work is important to her, but didn't consider that important for Don. I'm not convinced it was actually important for Peggy, at least to me as a viewer.
But still, ultimately I'm happy with where we leave all of the characters I'm most invested in, and it all feels earned. Hard to pull off.
(It's funny Mad Men and Duster coming up in the same post, because I am still bothered by some of the stuff in Don's timeline, though it's definitely not as egregious.)
It's fun to find the bread crumbs leading to the Peggy/Stan hook-up on a rewatch. The locked up in the hotel and getting naked episode got it started. Many other times Stan made little gestures showing his affection. One of the creative dudes from Cutler/Gleason/Chaugh called him out with a "get a room" type comment. There was a kiss at one point that Peggy was kind of blind to. The foundation was laid over many years.
That's fair -- the "out of leftfield" part is really only true of Peggy's side of it, and maybe that fits? Maybe that's what works best for her arc -- all these guys who either don't understand or appreciate her work (not sure where Duck fits into that, but he doesn't have much respect for creative in general), and then the guy who is maybe finally the right fit is a guy who has had the time both to get to know her as a person and to truly respect her work, and she's so work focused that she doesn't see it coming.
Yesss!!! I hated the Diana story. And I'm a Mad Men apologist. It felt so wrong-footed to me. Like why is he pursuing this woman?? Perhaps just a sign of how lost he was by that point.
100%. I think a lot about it works on paper—I can buy that Don is at a point that he fixates on this woman for reasons that don't really have anything to do with her, and that it's a convenient excuse for him to bolt, which he's been threatening to do since first season. It's just that Diana isn't a very interesting character (which I don't think is the fault of the performance, Elizabeth Reaser is great in other stuff), and so the whole thing is just tedious to watch. It's a rare misfire, it's just unfortunate that it happens in the final stretch.
On the plus side, it got him on the road! I thought the stuff between him and the veterans group was very strong. Wojo smacking him with a phone book! And the little bit of him making up a cover story while looking for Diana made me think I would've liked to see him in a Paper Moon TV show. He's got good "charming traveling con man" energy.
I agree completely. I found her so unappealing - like what is it he sees in her? All of his other affairs were wonderful, three-dimensional female characters, so why is this the last one we see?
Hey Alan, any plans to check out The Eternaut? It seems up your alley, has good reviews and exploded on non-english Netflix.
It's in my queue, but I'm underwater on so many things. And subtitled material simply takes longer for me to watch, I'm afraid, and I'd prefer not to watch the dubs if I can help it.